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On Thursday, my local newspaper ran a quarter-page article on the translation of a newly translated approximately 3rd Century papyrus which quotes Jesus as referring to "my wife." Needless to say, if Jesus had a wife, that would be news to most of church history where there is almost nothing supporting such an idea other than a few heretical texts.

But, of course, that is the question regarding the Jesus Wife Gospel (which, given the fact that it is only a fragment of a work that may be very short, should not be called a Gospel at all). Is it an heretical text or is it something worth reading? In saying, "my wife", was Jesus (if he really did utter those words) referring to his bride, the church, or to an earthly wife?

Rob Bowman on his Religious Researcher blog, has published a page which he plans to keep updated with resources both in favor of and counter the authenticity of the Jesus Wife Gospel. You can find the resource here: Karen King's Jesus Wife Papyru…

Scientists have been chewing over the mass release results of the ENCODE experiments for the past several days, and will doubtless continue to do so; while ID and creationist proponents hop up and down and proponents of completely non-intentional biological development scramble defensively in various ways and...

...and, frankly, at first I didn't see what the big deal was.

At first.

I'm going to assume for sake of relative brevity that anyone who is reading this page on the internet knows how to search the internet for pages to read, so if you don't know what I'm talking about, search around for "ENCODE", or click on our sidebar links for Proslogion (which tends to slant young earth creation) and/or Evolution News and Views (which tends to slant old earth creation)--you won't have to page around far to search them for discussion on it.

Very shortly, and somewhat oversimply, the project involved mapping genomes (I honestly don't recall if it was even t…

It's safe to say that many Christians have an ambivalent stance towards paranormal activity. Many Western Christians have been culturally conditioned to posit a stark dichotomy between two realms: the natural world, which they define in terms of the everyday, humdrum, physical reality we experience most of the time, and the supernatural world, more or less limited to God and angels. If they allow for the possibility in our day and age, they take miraculous healings and visions to be signs of God's direct intervention in human affairs, with immediate evidential value in arguing for Christianity. Further along towards the charismatic end of the spectrum, demonic influence and exorcisms may enter the picture.

This world-picture is problematized, however, by the fact that seemingly supernatural occurrences, including dramatic healings, visions of the departed, precognitive dreams, etc. are not confined to Christian saints or even Christians in general. In fact, they're not eve…

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